Posted
by
msmash
on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @04:40PM
from the where-there-is-fire dept.

In its first year, the Trump administration kept one little-known courtroom in the capital busy. From a report: A secretive Washington DC-based court that oversees the US government's foreign spy programs denied more surveillance orders during President Donald Trump's first year than in the court's 40-year history, according to newly released figures. Annual data published Wednesday by the US Courts shows that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court last year denied 26 applications in full, and 50 applications in part. That's compared to 21 orders between when the court was first formed in 1978 and President Barack Obama's final year in office in 2016.

is Trump's administration denying more requests a good thing because they're denying bad requests or a bad thing because they're making so many outlandish requests. No real telling since it's a secret court.

is Trump's administration denying more requests a good thing because they're denying bad requests or a bad thing because they're making so many outlandish requests. No real telling since it's a secret court.

Well, only one of the 11 FISA judges has been appointed since Trump took office, and Trump and his administration had no control over the choice -- appointments are made by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, with no executive or Congressional oversight, review or even input. Chief Justice Roberts has appointed all 11 of the current FISA judges. So, it's safe to say that the composition of the court hasn't changed with the administration.

What has changed is the leadership of the DoJ. So it seems clear that what has changed is the nature of the requests -- or possibly the number, but it would require a massive increase in number of requests to cause this change. My money is on the nature of the requests.

OTOH, the court rejected nine in 2016, the largest number in any year (until 2017). From 1979 to 2015, there were 12 rejections, in 2016 there were nine, in 2017 there were 26. So the change seems to predate Trump, a little.

So it seems clear that what has changed is the nature of the requests -- or possibly the number, but it would require a massive increase in number of requests to cause this change. My money is on the nature of the requests.

The number of requests is actually down (but barely.) The rate of rejections tripled.

But the real question is:"How many requests were accepted in each year?"

It would also be useful to have access to the nature of the requests, so one could decide whether or not the request was reasonable. But when even the number of accepted requests isn't shown, that may be unreasonable even for wishing.

It might not be the nature of the requests, but the willingness of the court to "work" with this administration (ie. they stopped rubber stamping all requests and started doing their job being one of the powers).But since the land of the free has secret courts, secret policies and secret interpretations of them...

Read the Nunes memo again very carefully. Note exactly what it claims and what it doesn't claim. It says that the Steele report in question was sent to FISA without complete attribution, not that it was presented as an unbiased source. It mentions one specific article that was not corroboration for the Steele report, and doesn't actually claim that there was no corroboration. Nunes appears to have been very careful to not actually say something false, and carefully constructed a network of facts that s

I live under the same sky, but can turn my head to see in all directions instead of just nose turned up.

What if you're on opposite sides of the planet? The extent that you can be "under" the sky is the extent to which it can be the same sky. The sky above you may be the sky below him. When you're both talking about being under it while standing on a spheroid surrounded by sky, there must be at least 2 distinct skies divided by some great circle. Otherwise you're simply within the one and only sky.

I'm not sure what your news diet consists of, but I can only assume by your statement that you were either in a coma during the 2016 season, or you've never used social media.

I've got a very small number of conservative friends on social media and I could still name at least a dozen fake news websites that were all over the place during that time period. One of them that really stood out to me and is still around is truthfeed.com, which was constantly peddling pro-trump/anti-hillary bullshit on a daily basis.

Fake News is a very real thing, and it's exactly what it sounds like; websites built to look like a new site, but filled with patently false or distorted stories and little to no transparency about who is running or financing the site. This is/was a real thing, and its dangerous because the average American is so mindnumbingly stupid they would believe this crap and share it online with their equally dumb friends. That's how we got nutjobs believing the Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of a goddamn pizza shop.

Then you have Donald Trump step in and start calling ALL news "fake news", thereby co-opting the phrase and completely destroying all meaning it once possessed. I have no idea whether he did that intentionally, or he just bumbled into it like most everything in his life, but the effect is the same, it's become a tactic to de-legitimize professional journalism in favor of bullshit hackery the same way that Fox News vilifies everyone else as "Mainstream Media" when they themselves are absolutely part of that very same media.

It's been fake news for a long time. I think you forgot how fake news started: It started by the large media providers (NY Times, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, etc) calling out the sites you mentioned as fake news. The only problem is that the spotlight accidentally shined upon them as well. All of a sudden it became obvious that something way more sinister was amiss than normal journalistic "bias".

Fake news is pretty old. What's new is the fake news websites. The difference between fake news and the New York Times is that the Times works for accuracy and retracts inaccuracies. Fake news works more like propaganda as described in Mein Kampf.

If a fact is reported in the NYT, it's very likely accurate. That doesn't apply to fake news, which will make up all sorts of things.

According to FISA's data, in 2016:"The FISC disclosed that it received 1,752 applications in 2016. After consideration by the court, 1,378orders were granted, 339 orders were modified, 26 orders were denied in part, and 9 applications weredenied in full."

Meanwhile, in the latest report, from 2017, during the first year of the Trump administration:"The FISC disclosed that it received 1,614 applications in 2017. After consideration by the court, 1,147orders were granted, 391 orders were modified, 50 orders were denied in part, and 26 applicationswere denied in full."

So what does this tell us? Applications for survellience were actually a bit lower, but denials went from.5% of Obama's FBI to 1.5% of Trump's FBI's requests. Does that mean the requests were of lower quality in 2017? The FISA court was feeling a little chastened by all of the publicity of its usual rubber-stamp policy? Or the FISA court is a bunch of liberal cheeto-haters? Hard to say?

When the full numbers are shown, it seems more it's a big bag of nothing. Just like the doomsayers proclaim that on December 21, 2012 there would be the end of the world because of sun and Earth alignment [youtube.com], the doomsayers were right about the alignment. However the same doomsayers either fail to mention or didn't know that the alignment they mention happens every December 21st and 2012 was not different than any other year.

The other nonsensical point that was brought up was that the Mayans didn't extend their calendar past 2012 therefore 2012 must be the doomsday according to them. The fact that the Mayan civilization didn't survive long enough to extend the calendar might be the more obvious reason why they didn't extend it.

And why would you think Trump is the only person who would be surveilled? He's not the entire organization that ran his election. In fact,19 people besides Trump have been indicted so far in the course of the investigation. It's not unlikely that some of the information used to indict them was obtained through FISA orders.

And why would you think Trump is the only person who would be surveilled? He's not the entire organization that ran his election. In fact,19 people besides Trump have been indicted so far in the course of the investigation. It's not unlikely that some of the information used to indict them was obtained through FISA orders.

None of which you wrote. You wrote Trump specifically. But to address your point, I bring you the example of Michael Flynn. His downfall was that he failed to disclose communications with a Russian ambassador that were being monitored because ALL communications with a Russian Ambassador are being monitored by the NSA, CIA, etc. For someone asking to be head of the National Security Council, Flynn either disregarded or did not know that.

Stop pretending that I didn't mean the entire investigation. It's a stupid strawman argument that you're using to try and make yourself feel like you were somehow right about wildly misinterpreting what should have been obvious to you. And it's not working. You're just making yourself look worse with every post.

This what you wrote:
"Or it could be that the FBI is investigating trump and the FISA court wants to make damn sure they're on solid ground when they approve an order." You clearly did not write anything of the sort so I am to read your mind and figure out what you meant?

It's a stupid strawman argument that you're using to try and make yourself feel like you were somehow right about wildly misinterpreting what should have been obvious to you. And it's not working. You're just making yourself look worse with every post.

So basically you're blaming someone else when you did not write clearly. Also I addressed your point. How do you answer the fact that in the case of Flynn, a FISA request was not needed as the Russian Ambassador is always under surveillanc

You're the only person it's not clear to. There's only one FBI investigation of Trump going on and it includes Russian interference in the election. Flynn was stumping for Trump and meeting with the Russian Ambassador, so yes, he was caught up in that investigation.

And I'm now done explaining the blindingly obvious to an idiot who insists on trying to find some technicality to make his arguments right. It's clear you aren't going to stop and you aren't willing to accept that you're making a fool of yours

You're the only person it's not clear to. There's only one FBI investigation of Trump going on and it includes Russian interference in the election. Flynn was stumping for Trump and meeting with the Russian Ambassador, so yes, he was caught up in that investigation.

My point which you clearly missed or are ignoring is that no FISA request would be required to monitor the Russian ambassador. Therefore, the FBI would not need to be make sure that they are "on solid ground" because the CIA and NSA would have already been monitoring him.

But let's look at what we know. The FBI is investigating events that happened before and around November 2016. Please tell me why the FBI needs a FISA request to surveillance people for things that have already happened in the past? You do

I'm going to be lazy and ask if anyone's done a statistical analysis to see whether the difference between those numbers is statistically significant. I suppose I could figure it out myself, but as I said I'm going to be lazy on this.

Better stats than the linked paper. But you are right - I thought only full rejections were counted, but it seems full or part rejections were, so the number for 2017 should indeed by 76. In any case, it is pretty obvious that 2016,2017 are different from 2010-2014 in the fraction rejected - even if this difference is tiny.

Very few are ever denied. In fact, if pressed they don't even have to go to court first and can just spy and get FISA approval later. Sometimes this retroactive request is denied, but you know. Emergencies. This happens to various presidents.

The running joke is that very few are denied, so this headline is idiotic.

A better headline might, sadly, be, "As with all other presidents, almost every single FISA request is approved."

It says 'they' are embarrassed by the unreasonable approval rates that were revealed after the election. The judges are _now_ doing their jobs, not rubber stamping.

Which is good, I guess. Another example of routine corruption that got exposed and derailed by Trump's election.

The problem is, it's statistics that don't mean jack squat.

It COULD mean the administration is doing their job. Or it COULD mean the administration is producing very poor requests that judges are denying because they're stupid.

And the latter is certainly possible if a certain commander in chief wanted to spy on all his "enemies" and got rejected more times.

The problem is, we don't know. We can never know because the nature of the courts won't let use determine if the rejections are because the courts are applying more scrutiny, or because the requests are of poorer quality and thus rejected because there is no basis for approving them?

Lots of jobs at the State Dept have gone unfilled, because Trump hasn't nominated anyone to fill them (and Tillerson was in no hurry to, either). The CIA and FBI have both suffered a lot of shakeout since Trump basically declared war on them.

Did you see the Comey exchange with Anderson Cooper on CNN? Cooper - super liberal Cooper - busted Comey's chops for being the FBI leaker. It was hilarious to see him try to explain himself. Hell, even the left hated Comey's guts before the election. Now with Comey and McCabe both exposed, not to mention the Strzok/page Trump hate fest, it sure looks like Trump was right on the money.

I don't know about the CIA specifically, but when DNI James Clapper lied to Congress, it didn't give me the warm fuzzy fe

So, as a way-out-there social liberal who really dislikes Trump and has said bad things about him (and thought worse things), I feel like I owe it to somebody to say 'well done.'

The cognitive dissonance in my head right now is making it hard for me to follow the threads in the comments. I really did not see this one coming.

Just, wow.

I'm on the conservative/libertarian end across from you. I did not vote for Trump. I think he's an egotistical asshole with no fixed ideological principles of his own to speak of, has no filters between his emotions and his mouth, and doesn't know when it's best to keep said mouth shut.

I'm almost as stunned as you.

I admire your honesty, we need more of that.

If I may, allow me to suggest reading a fantastic book by Jonah Goldberg called "The Suicide Of The West". Absolutely brilliant, no matter where you stand ideologically or politically.

What is more likely, a sudden break out of ethics in Trump world or something else?

I'm guessing it is something else. Here are some possibilities.

1.) Good people are doing their jobs. It has nothing to do with Trump. Some other event is responsible.2.) Trump appointed one or more of those good people. (It is certainly possible. His major criteria is how much they praise him, which doesn't eliminate the possibility of competence.)3.) They are being rejected because the requests are now so bat shit crazy that not even FISA will tolerate it.

Personally, if I was going to bet money, I'd bet on 3. We'd need to see a random sampling of requests then and now to really conclude much...

You should worry about what happens after Trump's staff has had time to get their ducks in a row. It took the Clintons time, expect the quality of Trump's team's warrant apps to improve with time.

Also recognize the FISA judges themselves will have skeletons in their closets. With time they will be compromised. Some are no doubt currently compromised by each side, some by both, and maybe a few 'not yet'.

From the Amazon reviews: "The most alarming chapter was when explaining identity politics and tribalism, the author focused solely on the progressive movement. Did not mention his conservative brethren at all.
Buyer beware."

Sounds pretty one sided. Another reviewer mentions that there are few citations and it's mostly the authors "feelings".

So, as a way-out-there social liberal who really dislikes Trump and has said bad things about him (and thought worse things), I feel like I owe it to somebody to say 'well done.'

.

I'm not American, but aren't the Executive branch, Legislative, and Judicial all independent? ie action by one is not necessarily because of the other?
This always confused me when every single thing gets credited (or blamed) to the President of the day, when the whole idea is that they are supposed to be separate.

They're separate, but the President has a good deal of influence over Congress, and the President appoints judges with Senate consent (pretty much a rubber stamp currently,. changing from flat refusals when Obama nominated someone). Most of the short-term stuff coming out of the government is from the Executive Branch.

You might want to temper that "well done" with a little bit of reality. The statement that more FISA orders were denied in 2017 than in the court's 40 year history is almost certainly false. We don't have any regular data on this for years prior to 2016; the court was not required to release this information, so for most of those years we only know about failed orders where information was released due to some other circumstance (for example, as part of a report about the efficacy of the USA FREEDOM Act, wh

Heck, my son got his job because of Trump. Trump scared Infosys into hiring lots of people already legal to work in the US. There's something Trump did that I definitely like. (Finding another is going to be more difficult.)

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is now facing possible criminal charges for lying under oath about leaks he made to The Wall Street Journal in 2016, in an effort to salvage his reputation and give his account to journalists who were questioning whether he gave a “stand-down” order to FBI agents investigating the Clinton Foundation.

Multiple former FBI officials, along with a Congressional official, say that while there may have been internal squabbling over the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation at the time, there was allegedly another “stand-down” order by McCabe regarding the opening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of her private email for official government business.

McCabe’s stand-down order regarding Clinton’s private email use happened after The New York Times first reported Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules in March 2015 and before the official investigation was requested by the Justice Department toward the end of July 2015.

After The New York Times publication, the FBI Washington Field Office began investigating Clinton’s use of private emails and whether she was using her personal email account to transmit classified information. According to sources, McCabe was overseas when he became aware of the investigation and sent electronic communications voicing his displeasure with the agents.

“McCabe tried to steer people off the private email investigation and that appears to be obstruction and should be investigated,” said one former FBI official with knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the investigation....

Who among James Comey, Loretta Lynch, and Barack Obama had to be aware of this?

Given that Obama also sent emails to Hillary's illegal email server, I'm betting it goes right to the top.

Not true. That money was from Terry McAuliffe the Virginia governor who got it from Hillary, and the part from Hillary was much less than a million dollars. According to Newsweek, and I save the article just to debunk these sort of claims, it was only $675,288. Not evidence that it influenced McCabe has ever been release much less proof that McCabe didn't fully investigate Hillary because of it.

Not true. That money was from Terry McAuliffe the Virginia governor who got it from Hillary, and the part from Hillary was much less than a million dollars. According to Newsweek, and I save the article just to debunk these sort of claims, it was only $675,288. Not evidence that it influenced McCabe has ever been release much less proof that McCabe didn't fully investigate Hillary because of it.

Oh, well then, no harm, no foul if it was only a measly ~$700,000 from a DNC political apparatchik. Oh, and ~$300,000 from HRC. That's chump-change, not even worth mentioning! I mean, sure, you could probably hire a contract-killer for less, but human life is cheap! There's no way that tiny amount of pocket change could influence somebody being paid those luxurious government wages.

Not true. That money was from Terry McAuliffe the Virginia governor who got it from Hillary, and the part from Hillary was much less than a million dollars. According to Newsweek, and I save the article just to debunk these sort of claims, it was only $675,288. Not evidence that it influenced McCabe has ever been release much less proof that McCabe didn't fully investigate Hillary because of it.

Oh, well then, no harm, no foul if it was only a measly ~$700,000 from a DNC p

Not evidence that it influenced McCabe has ever been release much less proof that McCabe didn't fully investigate Hillary because of it.

He didn't recuse himself for a conflict of interest. He lied multiple times under oath and got fired as per recommended by the OIG. There's the matter of intentionally misleading with "extremely careless" rather than "gross negligence".

The investigation was a sham, and that will become increasingly clear as information is dragged out of the justice dept. via FOIA lawsuits.

Nice hyperbole. A member of Trumps campaign make active overtures to someone in Britain the US security complex believed was a Russian Spy.

It wouldn't have mattered if they were a vacuum cleaner salesman, I'm willing to bet anyone making such inquiries would immediately get all your conversations spied on with an immediate FISA application. This is how things work, you start taking to people the US government things is an agent of a hostile government those conversations are probably going to be recorded, t

Are you saying that people involved in political campaigns should be immune from investigating unrelated activities? The FBI had good reason to want to spy on the guy, and Nunes couldn't deny it, no matter how hard he tried.

This is about the FISA warrants used to get information about someone who happened to be a member of the Trump campaign. Nunes really tried to say the evidence for the warrants was insufficient, but apparently couldn't come right out and say that, so he made statements that don't actually mean anything and tried to make them work.

Shesh... Be carful there with what you accuse the Trump administration of..

I'd like to point out that MONTHS ago, around the time of Trump's "Wires tapped" Tweet that caused a week of "He's crazy!" reporting, it was alleged that the Obama administration did just this, went to the FISA court to get a political opponent under surveillance. Since then, more evidence has surfaced that indicates that this is actually true. (Remember the dueling "memos" from the house committee? That's what this was all about.

The FBI, which is heavily Republican, went to FISA and asked for a warrant on a person suspected of collusion with the Russians. He was on Trump's team because Trump doesn't consider collusion with Russians a bad thing. Nunes convinced me that this was a legit investigation. He was obviously trying to say it wasn't, but had to dance around and say things that look like they condemned the investigation. Read the memo carefully.

So you admit that the wire tap was put in place but it wasn't Trump (It was Carter Page). Page hasn't been accused of any wrongdoing so far, but the warrant was issued based upon Page's name showing up in the "Steele Dossier" and little else.

I will remind you that the "Steele Dossier" was basically opposition research, started but abandoned by the Cruz campaign during the primaries, then heavily funded up by the Hillary campaign after the conventions. So the question becomes, how does opposition researc

Most of what you suggest would also be a good idea for regular criminal justice procedure. I'd love for Grand Juries to be contested procedures and I don't know why lying on a warrant application still isn't a crime.

It does kind of raise the question of whether you want to rule out so much evidence though. If you're investigating some international industrial espionage and stumble upon some terror cell getting ready to do something stupid, do you really want to throw out that evidence?

For FISA warrants? Yes, you toss the inadvertently found evidence about a US citizen that wasn't specifically being looked for. It is the price of using the secret warrant. This doesn't preclude you from using information on foreign national outside the country to direct an investigation of a US citizen, you just cannot use the FISA obtained information unless you get a warrant for the new crime, which means collecting enough evidence to get the FISA warrant and collecting new information you can use.

Trump is NOT under investigation , you really need to lay of the CNN and Huffington Post. The Mueller investigation will eventually in 5-10 years , every single charge will either be dropped or overturned.

I don't think you have to complain about him not fixing everything to stop loving Obama. He had an American citizen overseas assassinated after determining that he was a terrorist. That's not how that's supposed to work.

Better. The judge's are supposed to be skeptical as there is no routine review of these warrants as the cases progress. They were clearly rubber stamping, now they are embarrassed at having approved warrants on presidential candidates staff based on fiction.

They're clearly still rubber stamping. The numbers should be put into perspective.
They denied 26 orders... out of 1600, as opposed to the previous years 9 out of 1700.
I don't think they're embarrassed in the slightest. There are many explanations for increase from.5% denial rate to 1.5% denial rate.... The one I like the most- it doesn't mean dick, period. Everyone's trying to put a political spin on a slightly bigger raindrop falling into Lake Michigan.

The ideal time to fix this is after the next election. After the Ds have had a candidate's campaign spied on. But the danger is they will lose and the spying will remain hidden, as it would have if Hillary had won.

Exactly what would those warrants be? Warrants can be issued on the basis of unreliable information. It isn't a problem as long as the information is noted as from an unreliable or partisan source, which is something Nunes obviously wanted to deny (in the case of the Steele report) but couldn't.

if they are already doing this, then the hearing that authorized the Trump campaign surveillance needs to be made available to the appropriate committees.

Do you actually live in the U.S.? If so, what rock are you living under to have escaped the news of the failed Nunes stunt and not know that that's essentially what happened... or that it is kinda the nature of the FISA court that the presented information would often compromise our or our allies' intelligence assets.

You completely misunderstood the point of the article, and have it back to front:
This is the FISA court refusing government surveillance orders. The implication is that the current regime is asking for things they shouldn't get.

Obama refused 21

21 orders between when the court was first formed in 1978 and President Barack Obama's final year in office in 2016.

That quote is from TFA, you should read it.

A secretive Washington DC-based court that oversees the US government's foreign spy programs denied more surveillance orders during President Donald Trump's first year than in the court's 40-year history, according to newly released figures.

That is also from TFA, first sentence.
Let's not pretend that secret courts are a good idea however.

You've got the situation reversed. When you're a law enforcement officer dealing with national security and want to request a warrant, you can't go to a normal court to ask for a warrant since it's a sensitive matter, so you instead go to a FISA court to ask for a warrant. The Presidential administration isn't refusing anything: they're the ones making the requests, and it's the FISA court refusing the requests of the intelligence/law enforcement agencies serving under the President.

Anyway, depending on how you interpret the information, this difference could mean a few different things:1) If you assume that the FISA court has up to now been failing at its duty to provide oversight (which is a frequent complaint among many people here), then one interpretation is that the FISA court has finally started performing its duty instead of rubber-stamping everything that crosses their desks.

2) If you assume that the rejection rate for requests being made under Trump is the same as prior rejection rates, that would mean that agencies under Trump are making SIGNIFICANTLY more requests than agencies serving under previous administrations.

3) If you assume that the FISA court is behaving impartially and otherwise the same as before, then this difference is evidence that Trump's administration is abusing the system by asking for unwarranted warrants on a regular basis.

4) If you assume that the FISA court is acting partially, this difference could be evidence that the judges serving on the FISA court are rejecting requests on account of who's the boss of the people making the requests.

Or it could be some combination of the above or other factors that I've failed to account for here. The fact is, a single data point doesn't really tell us much about what's going on. I'm hoping the FISA court is finally waking up to their duties, but I figure that it's likely a combination of #1, #3, and #4.